In episode 28 of the GHOGH podcast, Jamarlin Martin talks to real estate and tech investor Barron Channer about the real value exchange between Nike and Black America.

You can listen to the entire conversation right now in the audio player below. If you prefer to listen on your phone, GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin is available wherever you listen to podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

This is a full transcript of the conversation which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jamarlin
Martin: You’re
listening to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin. We have a go hard or go home approach
as we talk to the leading tech leaders, politicians and influencers. Let’s
GHOGH! We have Barron Channer back on the show. Barron Channer is a successful
real estate and tech investor. You can check out his prior episodes, that would
be episodes 13 and 14. Let’s dive right in. Welcome to the GHOGH showed Barron.

Barron
Channer: Thanks
for having me back Jamarlin.

Jamarlin
Martin: Let’s
go ahead and kick things off with this Nike thing. Nike comes out and surprises
a lot of people and embraces Kaepernick. Nike’s with Kaep. Right? And a lot of
folks in our community, they start crip-walking. “Oh my gosh, this is so
great”. How did you respond to that event?

Barron
Channer: Yeah,
to me it was nothing new. I mean the reality is ,one, Nike started as a
counterculture company, right? Nike’s client base are people who skew younger,
more liberal. Their sponsored athletes base are people who skew towards inclined
to be supportive of Kaepernick, more so than not. So the only group of people
in the Nike sphere that could possibly impact them and disagree with the
position they took, may be some portions of their investor base, but from a
business standpoint it sounded like the easiest thing for them to do to just
simply say sometimes you take a risk and if you take risk and you get punished
for it, sometimes it may be worth it. Just do it. So to me it just sounded like
it was a simple thing to do. Should they be credited for it? Yeah, I think so
because they are a significant Fortune 500 company and the easy thing to do
would’ve been to stay out of it. Should they be lauded for it? No. Things like
that should be ordinary. It should be expected that you believe someone should
be able to exercise their constitutional rights, which may include them
disagreeing with you in the same way that we all accepted Larry Flynt being
able to run an adult entertainment establishment that may not have comported
with most of our religious believes or lifestyle beliefs. But he was able to
walk around and be a respected person and get interviewed on national and
syndicated shows.

Jamarlin
Martin: I’m
in the mood to debate today, but I share a lot of your…

Barron
Channer: You
know, I enjoy debating with you…

Jamarlin
Martin: When
it came out and everybody’s like, shocked. “Man, I can’t believe they’re
riding with Kaepernick”. I actually mentioned on the GHOGH show in a prior
episode that now folks are checking more for what someone looks like, how much
money someone has. We’re entering another period where people want more
substance. And so the companies are going to start to move to think about how I
can profit from some of these progressive movements. And in a prior episode I mentioned,
I believe it was Kendall Jenner and Pepsi, where there was a lot of backlash
trying to kind of pimp the movement. Nike embracing Kaep, as you mentioned, is
nothing new. Right? So when I was a kid, I think it maybe reflects our age a
bit because growing up I would wear Tim Hardaway’s with the X, I saw during the
Malcolm X movie, which at that time was controversial in terms of a movie with
so much Nation of Islam elements in it. Michael Jordan representing the X, Nike
coming out with the X Tim Hardaway shoes, Nike fully embracing Spike Lee. This
is nothing new.

Barron
Channer: And
not just embrace them with a pat on the back, but embracing them with commerce.
So give them an opportunity to make money and do business, which is the best
kind of embrace.

Jamarlin
Martin: Nike
understands its demographic, they know where their cool comes from. It doesn’t
just come from Black, but Nike’s cool has been coming from intelligent Black,
progressive Black, and so Kaep, I believe it’s just an extension of what they’ve
done over the decades intelligently. To your point that, hey, the community
shouldn’t be crip-walking. I think about the market cap of Nike, we’re talking
about $140 million dollars. So as a community, we have to be thoughtful on the
value exchange, right? Are we cheap where someone can just do something and we
act like it’s some type of systemic change where we support Nike. We don’t just
talk support for Nike, we help Nike stock, we purchase a lot of Nike shoes, we
influence their marketing, we help Nike, we bang for Nike. So if they do
something, they embrace Kaep, think about how much you’re giving to Nike and
they do this little thing for you.

Barron
Channer: I
would say there in the spirit of the debate. That part of your gift is your
contrarian perspective on culture. And I think that’s showing out a little bit
here, from the following standpoint. We’re trying to create norms and frame
relationships with people and every other Fortune 500 company, arguably every
other meaningfully sized company have run away from this issue. I suspect many
of them would probably be inclined to be supportive of Kaep if given an option,
support or don’t support. But they’ve taken the route of safety. So I do think
that as a community we should be showing some degree of appreciation when Nike
steps up to even get into the fray of the controversy. Right? So from that
standpoint, I think that we should be doing that because, which is sort of like
a relationship. It’s even if people are doing things that you’ve come to expect
or you should expect. If those things merit some degree of recognition, show it
so that it can be clear that, okay, we’re still paying attention because the
second we fall asleep and we say, hey, Nike did it, but so what they should
have done it. Then that starts to provide validation for others to be able to
say they’re not really engaged for or against anything. This thing has blown
over. So I was appreciative of it. And to me, controversy. If you’re Black in
America, you should embrace the idea that progress is going to come with some
degree of controversy. So I’m happy that Nike did what they did. We responded
in the way that we responded. There was a healthy debate in our community
because now it brings back to the forefront how silly this whole overall
conversation has been, and unfortunately how silly the folks who’ve been
punishing Kaepernick have been around this issue.

Jamarlin
Martin: The
community is happy about Nike’s embrace of Kaepernick. Does that mean that that
struggling Black parent, that struggling Black household, that struggling Black
teen, that adult, that we should ramp up more Nike shoe-buying, meaning that we
are overweight the purchase of overpriced shoes as a community. We’re
overweight, meaning that our community is bankable to pay relative to income,
relative to wealth, we’re buying these types of shoes more than anybody else in
the community. So Nike’s shoe sales, they go up, meaning that, I imagine that a
lot of people like this move. They have already tested it, they’ve calculated
it and now they’re going to profit more off of it. But, I think it would be a
bad thing if the community starts going out and buying even more Nike’s,
helping Nike’s market cap, and we don’t transition to a mindset that hey, if
I’m going to vote for Nike and I like what they’re doing, go buy the stock for
$86 dollars or so.

Barron
Channer: I
don’t know if I’d call it a bad thing, but I’d say there’s a missed
opportunity, right? So there’s the culture and the commerce part of this. So
our culture, like it or not, American Black community culture, embraces
fashion, embraces brands. And just think about most of your experiences as a
kid and you either were with the kids who wore the cool brands or you were with
the kids who didn’t wear the cool brands, and that sometimes was about money
and sometimes it was about the perspective of your family. So I would say it
would be a missed opportunity, but that’s a missed opportunity in the moment.
The greater opportunities still exists. What you should now know, if you are an
African-American designer or a Hispanic-American designer or an Lgbtq designer
is that maybe you can anchor your brand around things and people that don’t
seem obviously white-washed. You can actually be edgy and there’s an audience
for it. Now, some people may not have an appetite for it, but there’s an
audience there. So I’m always a firm believer that we as a community should be
encouraging ownership. And if you like shoes, there should be a shoe designer
that is in your closet. Maybe all your shoes don’t have to be designed by an
African American. But think about the folks who are designing shoes. And maybe
they designed shoes that are just as good and you should be supporting them, or
if you think you’ve got a better idea, go and build a shoe line and start
marketing it to your friends and colleagues.

Jamarlin
Martin: Let’s
talk about the timing of Nike’s smart play, profitable play, embracing Kaep.
Okay. So the timing of it is Nike’s under a lot of scrutiny. Their head of
diversity and inclusion. A brother, Antione Andrews quit. Their work culture
internally has been called into question by executives on the inside. And I
looked at the executive team of Nike, and it’s no surprise, my viewpoint
doesn’t change either way because I don’t see Nike banging in the streets from
a community perspective, right? I think they’re gonna pick their spots where
they can profit, where they can hit their earnings, they can grow market share.
But when I looked at Nike’s executive team, it looked like Netflix’s executive
team. It’s all white. I’m not even talking about Black folks. No Asians, no
Indians. It is a hundred percent white. And so the CEO, when they’re coming
under all the scrutiny, the CEO of Nike sends out an internal memo and he says,
we’ve done pretty much, in so many words, a poor job at hiring Black folks and
others. He doesn’t say it in those words, but he says that Nike as an
institution, that they’ve had trouble hiring folks that don’t come from the
good old boys’ club. What are your thoughts? How do you put this together?
They’re embracing Kaep, “Oh my gosh, this guy’s shaking up America”.
And then on the other hand, the management team looks like MAGA.

Barron
Channer: Yeah,
well, I think the world, for good, bad or indifferent, is going to have to come
to a realization that diversity on all levels: gender, sexual orientation,
race, those issues aren’t going away because the numbers of the people who have
usually been on the marginalized side of that conversation are too significant.
So you’re going to see an increasing wave of companies that have to deal with
that in some way. And I think that that debate is timely and a good thing
because what’s starting to happen is it means that the folks like us and Black
people have always been on the losing side of this debate about cultural
prominence or cultural influence on the things that are really meaningful to a
capitalist economy, is that those people are increasingly gaining value and
their opinions matter whether they are consumers and they matter in that regard
or whether it be that they are potential partners, aka sponsors, and they
matter in that regard. So to me it’s a good thing that they have come to that
point. I think what they’ve signalled is they’ve probably signalled to a bunch
of other Fortune 500 companies, not all but a bunch of them, that listen, this
is actually not a particularly controversial thing. It’s really blown over in a
shorter time than the Stormy Daniels thing has blown over. Right? And they’ve
moved on. And from a financial standpoint, we can debate that whether it’s been
a good thing or a bad thing, and in most cases it’s been a good thing for them,
so why wouldn’t other companies embrace that?

Jamarlin
Martin: Yeah,
I think it’s also an inflection point, where a lot of our people on the left,
progressive folks, we want radical change and if we want radical change and
something like this comes up, we can’t act like the Negro from 20 years ago, 10
years ago, 30 years ago. Meaning that the old Negro that is on the bottom of
everything, that’s losing in a lot of cases, the old Negro is going to go out
and buy a whole bunch of Nikes in Harlem. Gonna go out and buy a lot of Nikes
in Compton. The old Negro is going to go out and buy a lot of Nikes on Sunrise
Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, on the West Side. However, if we’re saying we
want radical change, then we have to remix the culture and say, hey, if the old
people would go out and buy more Nikes, in this case, the new one would either
need to buy the Nike stock so you can profit with Nike, or we have to think
about how we can build our own Nike. But we’ve got to do something different if
we want a radical change. And it starts with little things like this, I
believe.

Barron
Channer: I
would agree with you if we want a radical change. The nuance I think is whether
or not radical change is a realistic expectation in this particular instance.
And I’m a fan of taking incremental change in the face of no change, if you
can’t have radical change. So in this specific instance, it can be a “yes
and” scenario. Yes, Nike, we’re happy you did this, we applaud you for
doing this, and know that we have expectations that you do the other things
that we expect a company of your size to do if you want to enjoy a relationship
with us. Your leadership needs to reflect inclusion of our perspective. The way
you do commerce needs to reflect fairness with our suppliers. The way you
market your product needs to be sensitive to our communities, and the way that
you share in your resources as a corporate entity in the world needs to also
benefit our community. So it’s a “yes and “sort of thing.

Jamarlin
Martin: Yeah.
You’re talking my language because that brings up a good point in terms of Kaep
and the community possibly taking this opportunity where we’ll continue to
support you, but as a group, as a buying power group, we need to negotiate our
relationship with you. You’ve got everything too cheap over the years building
your $140 billion company. You got the Black community too cheap. But going
forward, let’s talk about a couple of strategic things we can work together on
a where you can benefit and the community can benefit a lot more than we have
in the past.

Barron
Channer: Yeah.
I’m right there with you and you’ve got to think mutual. Any exchange or
interchange, to be sustainable, it’s got to be mutual and Nike at heart is a
capitalist manifestation. It’s a publicly traded company, so commerce is going
to be not the only driver, but a primary driver, and I’m fine with Nike making
money off of people. The reality is, take me and you, you’ve mentioned the
price a couple of times. As a kid, the first time I owned a pair of Nike shoes,
I was probably 18 or 19 years old simply because my mother couldn’t afford them
and so she bought other shoes. But other people bought those shoes and worked.
Many of my friends worked at Burger King and Subway and other places just to be
able to buy the shoes and the clothes, so I’m fine with them doing commerce.
It’s just now that we’re all smarter about what a fair and balanced
relationship is, let’s start to make those demands of these retailers if they
want our loyalty. But to me, if you’re going to make those demands, it has to
be a multiplex conversation, right? You can simply talk about things that make
you feel good. If you’re not actually being empowered and if you’re not
actually being enriched, then it’s not something that transitions to the next
generation or allows you to help other people. So I don’t just want them to run
commercials and make me feel good. I like those as well. Yes. And I want them
to empower people like me, if not me and enrich people like me, if not me,
through their commerce, who they employ, who they do business with and they’re
a publicly traded company so anyone can buy their stock, but they can invest in
and partner with smaller companies to help them grow their brands.

Jamarlin
Martin: Do
you think Kaep will leverage his position and relationship with Nike, where
some may say, hey, Spike Lee, there was no agenda. Spike Lee, he got paid, it
was a mutual beneficial partnership between a company and the individual.
However, for the broader Black community, with some of these institutions that
massively profit off of us, who’s going to take the agenda to the beast?

Barron
Channer: Yeah.
It’s uncertain in terms of where Kaep will end up. I believe the brother has
the right to decide how he wants to proceed. I’m not sure he signed up to be a
martyr. I’m not sure he’s yet fully a martyr in the way that we’ve had people
martyred in our community. But he’s certainly been hurt in an unfair way. That
said, when you think about the situation, say for instance around Spike Lee, as
you mentioned, I think progress comes in you being able to realize whatever it
is you want to realize and make the impact that you can make in the community.
And that may not be the same impact that everyone can make. Spike Lee’s impact
in our community, and I can’t speak for him, but from the outside, is telling
stories and impacting mindsets in a way that allow you to reframe what goes on
in the world around you. And so if you look at the Nike commercials that he
made, the voice that he was projecting, the characters that he played in
addition to the characters that the others in those commercials play, that was
bringing in an element of his black culture to the table in a way that was not
simply farcical and so his relationship with Nike actually advanced his agenda
because he was able to tell stories in his characteristic way which allowed for
celebrating and even making fun of, in sort of loving ways, Black culture, and
he brought that to waves of people and so there was a certain cool or certain
exposure to Black culture that other people were being provided in an
accessible way, and the more accessible it became, I think that influenced a
lot of people, it influenced me. I suspect also his relationship with Nike
because his business, my understanding is, includes not only the filmmaking but
also the advertising portion of the business, which I suspect the advertising
portion of the business likely funded his ability to weight out all the various
nos he received in route to getting the yes to produce the movies that he’s
produced. So now Colin Kaepernick, you know, he’s an athlete or has been an
athlete. Unfortunately I don’t know that if he will ever get the opportunity to
be the athlete that he was in the way that he wants to be, but he is in a
position now where I think he can have significant influence if he seizes the
moment, but he doesn’t have to seize it in a public way in the way that I may
necessarily want him to. So I think he can figure out a way to leverage this.
I’m not sure what his personality or temperament is and what plans he has to
take advantage of it.

Jamarlin
Martin: What’s
your view of the element in the community, they’ll look at Colin Kaepernick
doing a deal with Nike, “Hey, you’re supposed to be about the cause,
you’re supposed to be Black, Black, Black, Black. You’re supposed to be all
about us. You’re not supposed to be for profit. What are you doing partnering
with Nike? You sold out.” What do you say about that?

Barron
Channer: Yeah,
I’d say that’s silly. First off I would say why should the man walk away from
the opportunity? He wants to get back into the NFL. So by that standpoint, he
would never be here if he hadn’t already, quote unquote, sold out to corporate
interest.

Jamarlin
Martin: What’s
the difference between Nike and the NFL?

Barron
Channer: That’s
what I’m saying. So if you’re fighting for him to get back into the NFL after
the NFL has done this and you’re upset that a company has paid him. I
understand they were paying him and not taking any credit for it while he was
being beaten up and then they made a commercial and paid him more money. If you
are upset about that, then you’ve got to check who you are and what you are.
You’ve got to ask yourself, what is it really to not sell out? If you live in
an apartment building that is owned by a publicly traded real estate investment
trusts with no African Americans on the board and a history of not great
relations with African American tenants in certain buildings across the
country, are you asking who your landlord is?

Jamarlin
Martin: That’s
a little different in terms of housing.

Barron
Channer: Well,
go and build your own house, go and find land. Since we’re going radical, go
find land. Build your own house. I’m from Jamaica. My grandmother and
grandfather built their own house, didn’t have finance and it took them longer.
It was built out of bricks and they raised the whole family there on land that
she bought with her money. So for those of us who are driving cars, maybe we
should go and find a Black manufacturer of bikes and ride a bike and just be
fine with it. So if selling out is engaging in commerce then America is a tough
country for you to exist in because you’re doing it every single day and in
often cases you’re doing it with people who necessarily go out of their way.
They don’t necessarily disrespect Black people, but they don’t go out of their
way to elevate and empower Black people.

Jamarlin
Martin: All
right? So some folks I think prematurely, I love Kaep myself. I love what he’s
done. I love the sacrifices. I love the consistency. Some folks have said Kaep
is the modern Muhammad Ali. Is that premature?

Barron
Channer: Premature.
Listen, Kaepernick did something that should be lauded. He took a knee and
continued to take a knee in the face of being challenged. Kaepernick did not,
to my knowledge, was not knowingly risking his life, right? I’m not sure that
he knew at the time that he was risking his career. He knew that he was doing
something that wasn’t necessarily desirable, but I don’t know that he was
risking his career. So if you’re going to start talking about Muhammad Ali, who
by the way knowingly accepted the likelihood of going to jail, knowingly
accepted giving up the world championship at a time when it wasn’t as if he was
enriched with a college degree, and all this other stuff that he would know for
a fact that he’d be perfectly fine. He took significant risks, but I’d even go
beyond that. We all have to take perspective here. We, at least those of us who
are in the Western world, I happen to be from Jamaica. We’re descendants of
slaves. There were people who at times took the risk of life and death for them
and everyone they knew just for the simple act of trying to be free and have
the right to exercise human dignity. So the rest of us who endure some level of
indignities, in my case, sometimes it’s not being able to get a business
opportunity in the same way that everyone else gets. In Kaepernick’s case, not
being able to be given the right to exercise his own personal beliefs in his
profession. None of us are going to be horsewhipped. None of us are going to be
tarred and feathered. Real people were actually really tarred and feathered.
None of us are going to be hung from a tree in the public square and burned for
what we’ve done. There are people who just for simply saying no, have had that
done to them. So we’re talking modern Negro issues here.

Jamarlin
Martin: Yeah.
Uh, you bring up some, some very good points, and with Muhammad Ali, let’s put
it in perspective. Muhammad Ali at a time when Malcolm X is talking violence in
America, Malcolm X talking separatism, Elijah Muhammad is talking separatism.
Muhammad Ali had the whole world looking at him and he said, I’m banging with
this. I’m banging with folks who are talking about shooting back. I’m banging
with folks are talking about real Black separatism here, and you can take my
title, you can take my freedom. I don’t care. I’m banging for the people. So I
do think, although I have a lot of praise for Kaep, but I think it would be
premature to start calling him the modern Muhammad Ali.

Barron
Channer: Yeah,
premature. But he should be lauded, right? It’s like saying is Lebron better
than Michael Jordan? He’s in this time. He exists in this context. So in this
context, as a privileged and talented athlete on the national stage, he took
great risk. Now the real question we should be asking is, and to me we should
go beyond Kaepernick. It’s the others, right? They all now know what the stakes
are. At the time, many of them didn’t. So the question would be, the people who
are no longer kneeling, no longer raising their fist, what calculus have they
made as to what they’re willing to do now versus what they were willing to do
those first three or four weeks, when the pain wasn’t obvious, right?

Jamarlin Martin: If Kaepernick looked like Buster Douglas, could he have gotten this far?

Barron
Channer: Yeah.
He absolutely could have.

Jamarlin
Martin: If
he didn’t look a certain way, like a multiracial man. If he looked like Buster
Douglas, could he have gotten this far, in terms of the notoriety, the main
stream media and Nike and all this other stuff?

Barron
Channer: I
think yes, and I think that’s because he inherited or he existed in a space
that is just a different lane when it comes to football. If you’re the
quarterback of the team, the eyes that are projected on you are substantially
different. Now, yes, there is a light-skin Black bias that exists broadly in
the world. I don’t think that that exists in athletics, I should think it’s the
reverse, but I don’t think it hindered him. I think he was talented enough, but
his position and the notoriety he has gotten, I think is mainly because he was
a quarterback perceived to be the face of the franchise and he never stopped.
Other people broke off the protest at a certain point.

Jamarlin
Martin: Well,
even within Black folks have of goodwill and who want to uplift our people, if you
take Malcolm X, part of the rationale why he was selected as a minister, it
wasn’t just his intellect and hard work, but there was a thinking within his
organization that our people are so sick in terms of an inferiority complex
against ourselves, our people are so sick, to pull our people out of that
inferiority complex, to pull the people out of that. I’m better off using a
fair skin, Black men and so certain ministers were prioritized, where you guys
are going to respond better to someone lighter. You guys are so sick. Even
preaching Black nationalism.

Barron
Channer: No,
listen, we’re animals, right? And we have an animal brain now we’ve evolved.

Jamarlin
Martin: I
take issue with that. But go ahead.

Barron Channer: Fair point, another episode. And so if you think about it, why are presidents of the United States usually taller than average? Right? Why are people with a certain resonance in their voice perceived as more authoritative, not necessarily because of their intellect or the content of what they’re saying, but there’s simply the voice. For Black people another dimension has been added, the issue of coloration, because being dark was such a significant negative at one point that being lighter or being less than dark become has become a built up advantage. And so it’s something that I think we’re progressively working our way out of and it’s built around giving someone the agency at an individual level to be who they want to be if they merit the opportunity to do so. And when you start to do that, you become less inclined to think about yourself in the eyes of others. Right? And that’s coming from, listen, I know that there have been many instances where me being a fairer skin person has benefited me relative to some of my peers, if nothing else than in perception. So the questions that are asked of me when I’m in certain environments are not the same questions that are asked of others. The sort of perception issues walking into certain places with a blazer. I’m not looked at…

Jamarlin
Martin: Looked
at like a Buster Douglas.

Barron
Channer: Yeah.
Or someone like that. So we all benefit from perception, including folks who
are attractive benefit from a certain positive perception. Folks that have a
body types that society celebrates benefit from a certain perception, right?
We’ll grow out of that over time. And I think you’re starting to see, the women
have been particularly good about progressing. I don’t know the details, but if
you watch what’s happening in the culture of women in particular Black women,
you’re seeing a broader embrace of body types and allowing for and celebrating
the fact that there is beauty in all types of body types. And as an individual
perspective, there’s no dominant form of what it takes to be beautiful. I think
that’s gonna extend progressively to coloration and at least we will be able to
grow out of that. I think the larger community may end up growing out of it,
but we are masters of our fate now. We can dictate to people how they interact
with us when we elevate our voices. It’s when we’re silent and we accept the
status quo, even though we don’t like it, that things continue to happen.

Jamarlin
Martin: Okay.
I want to change gears here and talk about something that is concerning me
right now. You lived through the 2000 tech bubble and crash. You lived through
the 2008 real estate bubble, asset bubble and crash. So you have experience.
You’ve seen it where all the experts and everybody’s saying, “Oh man,
these good times, they’re going to keep on going”. And then all the
experts and a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of investors, they really get taken
to the cleaners from a risk management perspective. They never thought that
things could turn so fast and so hard. And so when I talk to a lot of
entrepreneurs and I read some of their commentary, there’s no mention of
profits. In Silicon Valley, there’s a philosophy that, hey, profits can come
later. You’ve got to go really big, really focus on growth. Profits will come
later. However, for the Black entrepreneur who’s dependent on what I would call
foreign capital, if the data says that you’re going to have a much harder time
possibly raising capital because a lot of your people haven’t had big exits.
People have not seen a lot of you guys come by the desk and pitch, and some of
us are racist. But for the Black entrepreneur…

Barron
Channer: I
say, lack cultural sensitivity.

Jamarlin
Martin: Okay.
For the Black entrepreneur in terms of economic cycles, do you think Black
entrepreneurs and founders and investors should have a heightened sense of
awareness, if you’re dependent on foreign capital, outsourced capital, hard
capital to get, where everyone is cheerleading what I would call a bubble. I do
believe that there’s a bubble. No one is talking about profits, but is this a time
for a reality check for Black entrepreneurs and investors in terms of where we
are in the economic cycle?

Barron
Channer: Now,
perspective should be heightened, but I think you should always be obsessively
thinking about what are the systemic risks in your life and your business. And
to your point, if you’re getting capital from folks who have some degree of
discretion, and people forget, even if we have a contract, my discretion is to
just say I’m not going to perform and I’ll accept the outcome. And I don’t know
too many folks who’ve taken investors to court to sue them for not delivering
funds. Also, most of the documents you sign give them some level of out in a
worst-case scenario. So investors, African-American entrepreneurs, who have
always unfortunate for them and unfair, had less access to capital, need to
view capital as a systemic risk and be obsessively thinking about how to
maintain their access to it, and if that means that your business model has to
adjust to the investor population, now you have to start thinking more about
profits or think about profit in a deeper way, or maybe you need to start
globalizing your access to capital, right? So that you have more people who
aren’t simply locked into the American economic system, aware of you as an
opportunity to invest in.

Jamarlin
Martin: Let’s
research 2000 in terms of how checks, they can stop, including venture capital,
it can stop immediately. Follow on rounds. 2008, everything stopped. Investors
just stopped writing checks in a lot of cases for everybody. But for the Black
entrepreneur, would you say that because of the institutional environment, how
everything is set up, where we are today, should the entrepreneur have a
heightened sense of kind of racing to profitability, cash flow?

Barron
Channer: Yes.
I mean the short is, and maybe you can track back, maybe this time is
different. I don’t know. I’ve heard it many times and you alluded to 2000 and
2008. I’m not sure if I was dumb or unlucky, but I had the wonderful fortune of
being a tech worker in 2000 as a computer engineer, valued on paper at that
time in my early twenties, $5 million, I remember as of maybe January of 2000
and then by May of 2000, maybe April of 2000, it’s essentially zero on paper.
And then in 2008, I’m in real estate as a real estate developer, working for a
real estate developer and we go on a run where essentially for those four years
we had nothing to do. In both of those instances, what you realize, and I’d
been told that before in school, Undergrad as well as Grad school, is Black
folks are the last people hired and the first people fired when things go
really bad because the extra consideration for diversity and all of those
things go out of the window and people just simply run to safety and fall back
to their natural biases.

Jamarlin
Martin: Reliability,
statistics…

Barron
Channer: Or
their natural biases. Right? Which is, hey, I’ve not usually done this before
and this was a special program. You were an emerging manager or you were in my
Black tech fund and now we’re all just trying to survive. So I need to go to
the core fund. Entrepreneurs need to have that same mindset and realize that
traditional capital will come to you last and leave you first relative to your
other counterparts, and the question is what do you do in response to that? I
think one of the steps is to erase the profitability and try to be in a
position to have a stronger profile for the traditional investor. The other
approach is can you somehow hack the capital-raising system and find ways to
get pockets of dollars that are broader, have less exposure to U.S. systemic
risk, right? Of course there’s global risk, but can you find pockets of
investors? That’s part of why I’m telling people, listen, you’ve gotta get
smart about ICO and securitize token is one option. Two, you’ve got to realize
that there are people in South America and families in Europe and families in
Africa who are wealthy and have funds and are looking for interesting things
that are really doing well in the U.S. That can be expanded to their continent.
So maybe you find a pool of investors outside of the traditional norm of the
U.S. Venture capitalists, or in addition to.

Jamarlin
Martin: You
look at where we are in the economic cycle, meaning that I believe we’re due
for another crisis where capital freezes up again. No one obviously knows the
time, but 10 years into this bull market, I believe we’re due for something big
to hit. One of the things I think about is you read about all these
entrepreneurs, they go hiring, hiring. We’re hiring a whole bunch of engineers.
We’re hiring 200 employees. We’re doing that and so the new entrepreneur, this
is their first time, they may complain about pattern matching on the investors
side, but they see other entrepreneurs and they’re like, man, you gotta go big.
I got to hire all these people. You really want to play out a scenario where,
what happens where you don’t get to break even or profitability. You’ve got to
go back and raise capital but you’re in a very messy recession or crisis. And
so, I believe, one of the under-appreciated aspects of a good entrepreneur or
superior entrepreneur, is some type of risk management analysis, where it’s
like you’re a hybrid entrepreneur. You’re going for it for sure. However,
you’re a risk taker, but you have acquired a private equity mind, in terms of
there’s a certain way a VC and entrepreneur thinks, and there’s a certain way a
private equity investor thinks in terms of return, cash. One of the things to
think about is, hey, where we are in the cycle, obviously you want to look at
it relative to your industry, but where we are in the broader economic cycle
is, are we at a time at the end of the cycle? And do I want to hire 25
employees? Or do I want to just hire five and let’s see how this thing plays
out?

Barron
Channer: I
actually think that the subconscious psyche of humans is highly, highly evolved
and people make very smart decisions without knowing why. And if you on large
scale, and if you think about the scenario for the average investor, the vast
majority, probably high 90s percent of the capital that has gone into their
business is other people’s money. If you gave me a scenario where other
people’s money is substantially funded by effort and those people tell me they
value scale, which means I have to take on operating expenses, primarily labor
to scale, I’m going to respond to it because they’ve rewarded me for something
and the downside of failure is not me losing money. It’s not necessarily me
losing reputation because the American culture’s already dealt with the culture
of bankruptcy and things of that nature. It just me having lost the
opportunity, but going back to that axiom, scared money doesn’t make money. Now
if you operate with my mindset, and I’m not a tech entrepreneur, today my
mindset is, everything I do, even when it’s not my money, I operate as if it is
my money. So the loss of money is a painful thing to me. And so I’m always
focused on, you cannot sink the ship. It’s one thing if you lose some of the
stuff off the deck, but you cannot sink the ship.

Jamarlin
Martin: What
would you say to that sister, brother, entrepreneur, founder, they’ll say, in
today’s world, people sell their businesses to other companies. That’s the
highest probability or possibly you hit the Lotto and you IPO. But that third
thing that has changed is cash flow profits, that’s not part of the exit plan.
So now in terms of the current environment, profits is not really in the mix in
terms of some type of investor return, or it’s part of the liquidity plan for
the founder and the investors to return cash from the profits of the business.
So you remove that now, in the current bubble cycle, profits don’t matter. And
so that sister comes to you and says, look, you’re old school, you may just be
an old head. In tech, we don’t care about cash, we don’t care about profits.
I’m going to sell this business, or maybe I’ll IPO. What’s your response to
that?

Barron
Channer: Well,
my response to that would be, you may be right, so let’s sit down and talk
about it. And I would start to try to discern whether or not your product or
service is truly groundbreaking and innovative, because I do believe there’s a
place for things that are groundbreaking or innovative for them to merit
continued focus, even when they’re not making money because they’re going to
start to be applied at a future time and become relevant. And so I’d say if
you’re doing something that’s groundbreaking and innovative than, okay, there’s
a place here for us to turn around and to sell this to someone, but let’s
really, really ask that question and if you find out that what you’re doing is
not particularly unique but it’s profitable or rather it’s successful and it’s
scaling, then you have to realize when it’s time for you to sell, there’s going
to be a wave of options. There are going to be copycats tomorrow. And if your
business is not a successful business, as measured by profits, or at least
revenue growth and your product is not unique, then what really is the value
beyond your head count?

Jamarlin
Martin: If
you’re a believer as I am, that there is systemic bias in the private capital
markets, a lot of the younger generation, they may not know that if you believe
that there’s bias in raising capital and pitching to everybody and there’s bias
there, there’s also bias when it’s time that you’re a forced seller. You may
have to sell your company or you may want to sell your company, but the bias
shows up there too. Is this something to think about in terms of how you manage
the growth and the budgets of the business?

Barron
Channer: Life
and business is simple if you just simply translate the basic things in your
life to the complex things in your life, and if you think about any
relationship you’ve had, the condition under which that relationship broke up,
right? Why you broke up, why there was anger towards you was substantially
different than when you started it. So when things are good, the perception
that people have about whether we should continue or not are drastically
different than when things are bad. The same is true in business. When the
markets are melting, when capital is constrained, the expectation of the very
same investor who told you scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, don’t worry about
profits, now becomes, I need profits because I can’t go to LPs or go to my
individual investors and tell them that I want to put money into companies that
aren’t making money because cash flow is king.

Jamarlin
Martin: When
you see nine out of 10 entrepreneurs in this current environment, they don’t
care about profits now, they don’t care about profits in a few years. Is that
an indicator for you that hey, the market is likely to turn, approach to risks
and profits. Businesses need profits essentially.

Barron
Channer: I
don’t think that’s substantially different than what has always been the case.
Once venture capital became a prolific part of how you fund new enterprise. The
entrepreneur is always going to say, if you’re willing to give me money, and
that includes real estate by the way, if you’re willing to give me money and
more money, I’m willing to dance the dance.

Jamarlin
Martin: This
is where I see the friction because if you look at the data, hey, I can go back
to my investors, I’d get another round. And so I can always go back and get
capital from investors. However, with Black founders you have not had this
relationship to the private capital. You have not had the knowledge with this
private capital. You have not had the experience with the private capital going
back the last 30 years. These things count, so don’t pattern yourself after
groups who’ve been in the game a while and they have a certain connectivity to
the capital, a certain connectivity with investors where you start patterning
your business thinking that, oh, okay. I don’t have to care about profits
because I can just go back to investors just like everybody else. That’s where
I see the heightened risks out there.

Barron
Channer: And
listen, I agree with you on the overarching thesis. It’s what grandmother used
to say, right? You have to be twice as good to get half as much and I think we
would all be wise to operate with that mindset until the world convinces you
that things have changed, and the world hasn’t convinced me that have changed
in that regard as we start to gain more equity in society, maybe it will change
over time, but today you can’t tell me that the average Black tech entrepreneur
has access to capital in the same way that the average nonblack tech
entrepreneur does. You have to be particularly good, particularly privileged or
have a particularly strong product and so we have to think about that and
embrace that the rules aren’t exactly the same. Are the rules better for us
today then the past? Yeah, but they’re not exactly the same and that comes down
to profitability. But if you think about it, and again it goes back to what I
was saying, this is a modern Negro issue. Folks that are being funded with
these companies is they’ll get a couple of years, have a great run, right? They
all have a wonderful experience. If they get washed out, they’re not going
bankrupt, most of them. They’re losing a job. Maybe now they go and get a job
or they or they start a new company. But I tell people, if the market is
telling you to operate in this way and you’re doing so in a legal and ethical
way, then I’m not going to argue with you. For me, I’m about building wealth
and hopefully building intergenerational wealth, so I’m not interested in
taking significant losses and then having to come back with a new business card
and a new flagship. So I’d rather leave some profit potential on the table to
manage my risk in a way that allows me to say when things go really bad,
“Look, I did well with your money”. That’s why you should have a
20-year, 30-year, 40-year relationship with me because I’m not in a hyper
transactional business, but if you’re young and you’re getting the opportunity
to be in a magazine or go to these conferences and you’re being told that the
game that we’re all playing is you raise money, you tell us you’re going to
scale rapidly and you don’t worry about profits. I can’t begrudge you for
thinking that way. I do think there’s a place for folks to begin thinking
about. we want to build a sustainable enterprise, so this is not just simply a
new venture that’s raising money. We’re looking to build a sustainable
enterprise and it’s very possible that my kids or my grandkids are the ones
that are going to realize the peak of the mountain. I’m just climbing the
mountain and I can’t afford to fall off.

Jamarlin
Martin: Our
brother Andrew Gillum won the Democratic primary in the state of Florida. What
was your feeling when you saw that and you’ve been working so hard in the
streets? You’re one of the folks within the Miami business establishment that
backed him early on.

Barron
Channer: Well,
listen, I was happy, but you know, when you’ve spent a year expecting something
to occur and it plays out as you expected, it ends up being more about
contentment than euphoria. Right? So when I looked at this, and proud of Andrew
Gillum, proud of the person he is, proud of the ideals that he represented and
proud of his courage to step up at the moment. And I said in just looking at
the race, you know, what, I don’t think an African American will have a better
race to win for Governor given who Andrew is and who the other people are. I
don’t think that may happen in my lifetime. And I couldn’t talk myself out of
helping him. That was my initial inclination. I just wanted to focus on my
business. I spent a lot of my youth doing politics and I didn’t want to get
into it. And I looked at the race and said, he can win, he deserves to win, but
he needs help and I think I can be helpful in my own small way. I can’t walk
away from this fight. We can always lose. But he had every reason to win.

Jamarlin
Martin: How
much credit should go to Gillum rejecting some of the kind of Mark Penn,
corporate Democrat establishment where they think like, hey, you got to run in
the middle, you’re going to scare some middle white folks. Don’t go too far to
the left. But Gillum, for a Black candidate, he really impressed me where from
my perspective, he ran hard unapologetically as a progressive, On the core
policy issues, I’m not exaggerating differences or division within the
Democratic Party, but he ran hard left and he didn’t care what some of the
folks at the top thought. He ran hard left.

Barron
Channer: Well,
that’s the beauty of being new to the dance, right? You’re not tethered to what
has always been the mindset. You’re allowed without having any shame or guilt
to say the voters have told us what they want. They told us what they wanted
when they voted President Obama and he won the state. They told us what they
want when collectively Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders performed the way
that they performed. And something that I don’t think people give Mayor Gillum
credit for, in part because he’s such a spectacular orator. And so, folks boil
it down to charisma and passion. Folks ignore the fact that he is probably one
of the greatest political minds of his generation, and his experience in terms
of understanding liberal policies, having been exposed nationally to the
mindset of the voters who liberal policies, far exceeds most people.

Jamarlin
Martin: Yeah.
You bring up a good point where I felt the night that Gillum won, Don Lemon, I
had to turn the channel. Don Lemon spends like 10 minutes focusing on the fact
that Gillum is Black.

Barron
Channer: Which
matters.

Jamarlin
Martin: Okay
but Gilliam is in the streets in Parkland, talking about gun reform. He’s in
the streets talking about criminal justice reform. He’s in the streets
campaigning and articulating nuanced policy points, and he’s campaigning
crisscrossing the state. And Don Lemon doesn’t mention anything about Gillum
but the fact that he’s Black. My interpretation of that, when I saw it, because
you could say that I’m in Florida. I know Mayor Gillum, I’ve met Gillum, I’ve
talked with Gillum. Gillum has been on the GHOGH podcast, maybe I have an
informational advantage over Don Lemon.

Barron
Channer: I
think that’s what it is.

Jamarlin
Martin: You
don’t think that it’s just poor journalism?

Barron
Channer: No.
I don’t think it’s poor journalism because I think Don Lemon understands what
his audience expects of him and their expectations of him is to emote and to
project in a way that is a balance between your old school, Walter Cronkite
type of person, but also your new school sort of color commentary where it’s
part your opinion and part your emotions are being obviously projected.

Jamarlin
Martin: Yeah.
But you just talked about people don’t give Gillum enough credit where a lot of
of our great politicians, Barack Obama, Andrew Gillum, they’re cheapened in
terms of, hey, yeah, they’re the first Black politicians, yeah, they’re great
orators. There’s so much substance under these leaders. I feel like Black folks
in the media, our responsibility is to pull that stuff out to the surface, that
I would expect Don Lemon to mention that he could be the first Black governor
In the state of Florida. Yeah, that’s newsworthy. But how did this brother run
a campaign where no one believed he could win, including the Black Miami
establishment, where Gillum on the show, I talked to him about this, where I
received feedback from the Black Miami establishment that Gillum has no chance
to win. We’re not going to back Gillum. We’re gonna back Mayor Levine because
we don’t think Gillum even has a chance. So a lot of the people in Florida,
Black folks, a lot of people didn’t believe that Gillum could actually get
where he got, similar to Barack Obama.

Barron
Channer: But
those are people who don’t apply rigor to their opinions. And in general case
it doesn’t matter. Right? But you say we’re all guessing until it really
occurs. And what’s the base of your guess? Whether you thought Mayor Levine
from Miami Beach could win or some other candidate. What’s the basis of your
guess? And the thing that quickly boiled down to me when I think about
politics, because I balance both. Sometimes I can just passionately like
someone, but then you realIze hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people
have to vote for this person. So what does it matter if I have passion for this
person? What do the numbers say from a probability standpoint are likely, and
when you looked at who Mayor Gillum was, what he represented and his skill as a
politician in practice, but also skilled in communicating ideas. I looked at it
and I say, there is no way in this race he gets less than 20, 22 percent of the
vote. You remember me telling you, that was maybe a year ago. And if he does
that, there’s no way he finishes less than second place and he’s good enough to
win first place. So we’re in this thing,

Jamarlin
Martin: But
you don’t think that some of our brilliant political leaders, political minds
like Andrew Gillum, like Barack Obama, that we can expect white folks to
cheapen them. And oh, they’re Black. They don’t know anything. They give good
speeches, they’re good orators. We can expect the American establishment to box
some of our leaders into, they’re good speakers. They speak well. They’re the
first Black. I can expect that from other folks, but I think from our
perspective in the media, if you have Gillum on your show or you’re talking to
the country, you want to pop out what type of campaign did he run? What was he
doing that was different. Why spend 15 minutes talking about Gillum is Black.
We see that.

Barron
Channer: I
think in his defense, and I don’t know that he needs my defense. He’s not one
of the Sunday shows. If he were sitting at the desk of any one of those Sunday
shows which have a certain degree of rigor in terms of how they discuss a
topic, he would have peeled into it a little bit better, but I do give him the
latitude to celebrate something that was significant. Now mind you, I’m a
person who believes coming in second just means you’re the first loser. You can
be content that you didn’t come in third, but you still ultimately lost. So
that’s why I was more content the night of the primary. But I was ready that
night. I’m making phone calls. At 8:05 it was obvious that he is going to win.
I’m making phone calls then because I’m saying, okay, now we’re in the
championship round and Mayor Gillum stood up and put himself on the table to be
the governor of Florida, not someone who ran for governor and that’s not
decided on until Nov. 6. And so to me it’s just, sure, let’s celebrate the
novelty and the significance by the way. If you think about it, and we
shouldn’t lose this moment. If you think about the U.S. in general, think about
the Southeast dating back to reconstruction. I’m not sure, I haven’t studied
this, but I’m not sure that there has been any Black person nominated to be the
candidate of a major party for governor in any southern state dating back to
reconstruction, and the few people you can find in reconstruction that were
nominated or became governor, I believe there was someone in Louisiana. When
you really look at their platforms, they were essentially recruited by the
status quo and put into the race during the reconstruction era. So here you
have a Black man who happens to be mayor of the city who on his own volition
chose to run, ran with some opposition or some uncertainty from the
establishment, picked his own platform, so he is his own candidate. So I dare
say, and you have to recognize Miss Stacy Adams as well. He and her are the
only two candidates we’ve ever had in the southern U.S. who are Black, who have
been able to secure the nomination on their own platform. So that’s
significant.

Jamarlin
Martin: More
than a few Black celebrities supported other candidates. I definitely don’t
believe that, hey, it’s a Black candidate, all the Black people got to support
the Black candidate, no. But when you look at Barack Obama, Maya Angelou chose
the corporate Democrat at the time, HRC. Bob Johnson of BET did not choose
Barack Obama. He actually mentioned Barack Obama’s drug use to rally support
for Hillary Clinton in his speech. Magic Johnson did not support Barack Obama.
He supported Hillary Clinton. And so when we do have good leaders, Barack
Obama, Andrew Gillum, stop blaming everybody else is doing all this stuff to
us. We don’t really have any agency. We can’t change anything. The thing is too
big for us to change. But when you look at Andrew Gillum and members of our
community who believed in his policy positions, they chose not to support him
because they wanted favors from the white folks that they thought were going to
win. And so just as we see in business and investing, if our people want
change, and in some cases radical change, you’re going to have to take some
risks and you’re going to have to take some risks on your own. When you find a
good leader among us, even if the polls don’t show that this person has a
really good chance, take some risk on yourself for a change.

Barron
Channer: I
agree with you. And I think the Obama situation and this situation with Mayor
Gillum, I think are slightly different, but let’s focus on Mayor Gillum. I
think a lot of it had to do with some people wanting certain favors, but I also
think some people just did not believe he could win, but then you look and you
say, it’s one thing to say you think Hillary Clinton, who was the wife of a
former president, perceived to be loved by the Black community was likely to
win. But in this race with Mayor Gillum, which of these other candidates
suggested any overwhelming probability that they would win, such that you would
say there’s no chance they would ever lose. it just didn’t. It did not make
logical sense to me to not think that Mayor Gillum could win. And then if you
got to that point, you would say, if you in your heart of hearts think that he
represents potentially a better candidate, why not support him and take the
risks? There are losses and anyone can lose. As we saw, the people who were
supposed to win, lost. and Mayor Gillum, who I always knew would win at least
the nomination for the primary. I thought the challenge was, let’s see what
happens in the general. You heard me early in the game when I called you and
said, listen, I think he’s gonna win, and my rationale was always the same.
Numerically, he was in such a strong position in terms of his floor and
relative to the ceiling in comparison to others that I thought he had an easier
pathway, much easier to win. It just was not obvious. Now that required him to
be the candidate who we all thought he was. You got to do work. But if you know
how good you are and you know who you’re competing against, all you have to do
is perform and you know that it’s likely that you’re going to surpass the
others. And so I always thought that he was going to win. But getting back to
the core point that you’re raising. I think in our community, we have to
realize, and I faced the decision. The easiest thing to do, if your mindset is
wrapped around commerce, the easiest thing to do is to not do anything that is
obviously for the benefit of Black people. That doesn’t mean you want to hurt
them, but the easiest thing to do is to not say you’re doing it because you
think blackness matters as a part of it. But if you know it matters, and in
your heart of hearts it matters, why not stand on your conviction and take the
risk of potentially losing? The reality is it was a primary. So if you picked
Mayor Gillum and you support him and he lost, you turn around and you support
whoever won just the same way that everyone else does. And we have to start to
understand how to play the game strategically, which means not only winning,
but winning in a way that enriches your community and empowers your community.
And sometimes that means actually having the winner be someone who
intrinsically understands your community instead of just someone who wants to
understand it.

Jamarlin
Martin: I
want to thank Barron Channer for coming on the show.